In silver halide photographic light sensitive materials to be used for direct appreciation purposes such as color print papers, yellow, magenta and cyan couplers are commonly used in combination as the color forming agents for forming the color dye images.
The important factors for selecting these couplers include the color developability, image preservability and so forth of the resulting dye images. In particular, there have been increasing demands for improving the dye image preservability.
About the methods for improving the preservability of dye images, Japanese Patent Publication Open to Public Inspection (hereinafter referred to as JP OPI Publication) No. 62-180367/1987, U.S. Pat. No. 4,906,559 and so forth described methods in which phenol derivatives having specific structures are used.
In the photographic field, on the other hand, there have been demands for silver halide photographic light sensitive materials capable of performing under rapid processing, conditions which provide high image quality and constantly stable characteristics.
Usually, silver halide photographic light sensitive materials are continuously processed through an automatic processor installed at individual photofinishing laboratories. As a part of the customer services to be improved, it has been required to develop and return the finished articles to the customers within the very day the customer's order is received and, recently, it has further been required to return the finished article to the customers within several hours from the receipt of the customer's order, so that the necessity for rapid processing services has been further increased. In addition to the above, the importance of rapid processing is increased from the viewpoint of the cost reduction, because production efficiency can be improved by shortening the processing time.
In rapid processing, however, color developability is liable to deteriorate when the aforementioned phenol type anti-discoloring agent, for example, is added. Therefore, any sufficient amount thereof cannot be added. Among these agents, there are some compounds capable of maintaining color developability without deterioration. However, when these compounds are used, they cause poor light fastness, background whiteness deteriorates and sweating is produced in running processing with the passage of time during rapid processing. Therefore, it is not so easy to satisfy all of the color developability, white background property, image preservability and anti-perspiration properties and new techniques have been strongly demanded.